


Roppongi Tokyo Butler Café

by NuMo



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: AU, F/F, Japan, Maid cafe/butler cafe, One-Shot, the au you never knew you needed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-05 00:00:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15852105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NuMo/pseuds/NuMo
Summary: Myka is a young secret service trainee* on an exchange semester in Tokyo, Japan. She's found employment at a butler café (like a maid café, only with male/male presenting servers) that is mainly aimed at foreigners/Westerners. One day, a mysterious English guest arrives.Also known as "The maid café AU you never knew you needed".*I have zero idea if Secret Service agents are trained this way and if said training includes exchange semesters, and am simply assuming for the purposes of this story.





	Roppongi Tokyo Butler Café

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Faerirose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Faerirose/gifts).



The first time she comes into the café where you’re working, you’re on your way out and you regret that fact deeply. You know it’s her first time from the way she hovers inside the entrance, and your regret stems mainly from the way MacPherson swoops down on her immediately with his ‘My dear old friend, where _have_ you been’ routine. It’s surprisingly popular among the foreigners – no Japanese butler café visitor would condone such familiarity – but since this café is smack in the middle of Roppongi, Tokyo’s foreigners’ district, he’s lamentably successful with it. 

She’s beautiful, and hides her insecurity, the newness of this experience, with impressive speed, and you would like nothing better than to head over and hip-check MacPherson out of the way. He’s a perfect sleazeball, but he’s also an amazingly good actor in this game. And it’s the end of your shift. In fact, Kosan-san, your boss, is looking meaningfully at his clock – in subtle Japan, this is as good as shouting at you to haul your ass through the door. 

So you go. You throw one glance over your shoulder before you leave, though, and the way MacPee’s hand hovers over her shoulder makes your eyes darken and your jaw set and your mind turn to much worse nicknames that you and Claudia have made up for him over the weeks. 

-_-_-

The second time she comes into the café is the next morning, twenty minutes into your shift. You head her way immediately, no conscious thought involved. You’ve heard stories about last night, from the night shift before they left, of how drunk MacPee got her, of how they left together. And while, of course, that’s the customer’s discretion, you hope that the fact that she’s here again means that nothing unsatisfactory happened yesterday, and not that she’s come to complain. Not that Kosan would care much, customer discretion and off the clock and all that. 

As you come closer, she seems a bit hung over, but her eyes light up slightly when she gives you a once-over, and you’re glad that the café is one of those that offer bespoke costumes. Your three-piece suit is elegant, grey with light pinstripes, tailored tight to the body to accentuate your height and slimness (most guests are foreigners, and even the Japanese women seem to like being hosted by a tall gaijin lady-in-a-suit), wide in the shoulders and narrow at the waist and hips to help sell the fantasy that you’re a man, albeit a feminine one. You’re wearing a blue button-up underneath it and your hair in a tight ponytail down your back. It’s not complete drag; you’re quite visibly still a woman – the suit isn’t tailored to hide your breasts nor do you bind them, and you’re wearing light but definitely noticeable make-up. But it’s close enough for the guests to go with it. It’s the café’s MO, after all. Butlers they all are, but men? Not even half of them.

“Good morning, mistress,” you give her the customary, very much non-MacPee greeting with a precise little bow. You give her a smile too, but not a dazzling one. Now that you’re actually in front of her, you are certain she’s hung over, and so you resolve to give her quiet, restorative service. “Would you like some coffee? Or tea?”

Tea is the main selling point of this café – not green tea, not matcha, but the wide array of English teas, brewed to perfection by Wolly behind the counter, is what draws many, many Commonwealth folks to this place. 

“Tea would be lovely, thank you,” she says in a slightly pinched voice, and you realize she’s one of those folks – English is your guess, from her accent. You silently incline your head and lead her to the quietest corner of the café and turn to get her the drinks menu. A hand on your arm stops you – not that you mind, even if it’s very much against protocol. “I’ve heard that the tea here is outstanding and that there’s an Englishman behind the counter,” she says. “I don’t need the menu. Surprise me.”

You hide your surprise and simply say, “As you wish, mistress.”

She twists her mouth in distaste and answers, “Do call me Helena, if you please.”

Again, very much not protocol, and again you very much don’t mind. “Of course,” you reply with another quiet smile. 

Wolly nods as you describe her accent, her hangover, and the fact that she’s been here the night before. He reaches for one of the myriad of tins of loose-leaf tea under his counter, and you leave him to it, checking if there are other guests that need your service. The place is pretty empty – not unusual at this hour. The breakfast/coffee rush is mostly through, lunchtime hasn’t started yet. At the other end of the counter, you can see Steve and Claudia lounging and observing. Claudia throws you a wink, nodding her head ever so slightly in the direction of your guest, and just as ever-so-slightly, you shake your head and roll your eyes. It is your one hold-out – you won’t go home with guests. It’s not strictly required, even though it’s heavily encouraged, and you’re successful enough within the café’s walls that Kosan-san doesn’t press the issue. Claudia rolls her eyes right back at you and gives a more pronounced nod towards your guest. You look over and see that she’s looking at you.

Your heart misses a beat, and you hurry over to her. “Is there anything I can do for you, Helena?” you ask when you’re close enough not to have to talk too loudly.

She hesitates a bit, then sets her shoulders. You can almost hear her think ‘get on with it’ to herself. “I wonder if I could get something to eat,” she says slowly. Then she gives a tiny huff of a laugh. “To be quite honest I wonder if I _should_ get something to eat,” she amends. “I’m not feeling quite my Sunday best, I’m afraid. I wonder if you have any… remedies on your menu.”

One corner of your mouth twitches upwards. “We do offer food,” you say. If she wanted the actual menu, she’d probably have asked for it, so you assume she wants your help in picking something. “Why don’t you tell me what you feel like, and I see if we have anything that fits your requirements?”

She returns your almost-smile. It almost reaches her eyes, but you can see a curtain there, a wall. Fair enough, you think, we don’t know each other – plus she’s English. “I must admit I feel a bit queasy,” she says with an apologetic turn to her lips. “I don’t think I could stomach anything off the sweet menu. I'm fine with Japanese food, but for today nothing slimy, spicy or fried, if you please. And please,” she adds with a shudder, “my accent notwithstanding, please don’t even _think_ of serving me an English breakfast, or whatever you call it here.” 

You straighten, smile still on your lips, and incline your head. “Absolutely understood, Helena,” you tell her. “I have something in mind – would you care to hear it, or do you want breakfast, too, be a surprise?”

Her smile fades slightly as she scrutinizes you, and you feel a prickling at the back of your neck that makes you long to run your hand over it and give it a vigorous rub. You can see when she makes up her mind, and you know what her answer is going to be even before she opens her mouth. You saw the curtain twitch, saw one brick in that wall wobble ever so slightly. “Surprise me, please-?” she looks at you expectantly. 

“Myka,” you answer. Not for her the Japanese version, ‘My-kun’ – you want her to know your real name, protocol be damned.

“Myka,” she replies, and her smile is a good bit warmer. 

You manage to nod and turn gracefully to walk back to the counter, and you only almost stumble when you see Claudia furiously mugging at Steve. 

You tell the kitchen to prepare a simple miso ramen with a poached egg, and glare at Claudia and Steve until they dissolve into very much non-protocol giggles. 

She’s happy with both Wolly’s and your choice of surprise for her, and looks a bit more fortified when she leaves. You’re happy when you see MacPee come in for his night shift with a bruise forming on his left cheekbone and a definite damper on his jauntiness. You have no doubt whatsoever that Helena is behind both. Whatever happened last night, you think, she evidently can take care of herself.

-_-_-

Helena becomes a regular to the point where she takes every breakfast and every dinner at your café, and you wonder how much she earns to sustain this. You never ask, though – it is not your place. You’re her host, she’s your guest. Your job is to anticipate her needs, to serve her orders, to make her happier than she was when she came in. 

You think you’re pretty successful at that. 

You also realize she’s brittle. 

Her shoulders are tense, always. And ever since that first day, she comes in for her dinner early enough to catch the tail end of your day shift, rather than be hosted by MacPee again. She’s also never asked for alcoholic drinks again. You confront him about what happened, one evening when he comes in, sees you hosting her, and makes a disparaging remark about her within your earshot. He maintains he simply escorted her home, which, ‘wouldn’t you know?’, was twenty floors up in this very building, and claims she socked him, out of the blue, even still in the elevator. 

You don’t believe that for a second. 

You also have no way of finding out more. Pete, when you tell him, suggests hacking into the video feed of the elevator’s CCTV, but it’s been days by then and the tapes are sure to have been recorded over by now. 

Pete also suggests quite a lot of things regarding Helena, making you regret you ever mentioned her to him, roommate and fellow Secret Service trainee and best friend or not.

Two weeks in, her shoulders start to lose some of their tension when she sees you. She’s trusted you with her food choices every day. Alright, okay, so she trusts Wolly with the tea, too, but you tell yourself she doesn’t smile at him the way she smiles at you – still not big, beaming smiles, but even though they’re small, you think you see warmth in them when they’re directed at you that you don’t see when they’re directed at other people. 

The wall behind those smiles still exists, though. There are times when she looks at a dessert being carried to another table, her eyes wistful and wide, and then bleak and dark in a heartbeat. 

She misses someone, you think when you see her stare after a pancake plate with a sparkler in it. She misses someone she used to eat these things with. A break-up is your immediate theory, and there’s a darker one lurking in a corner of your mind that you’re keeping tightly shut, but you keep both to yourself. She’s your guest, you’re her host, and it’s not your place. 

You never bring her desserts. You never did so before, but you especially refrain from it now. 

Ten days more, and she doesn’t show up one morning. You’re tapping your fingers on the counter, and Wolly swats a tea towel at them and it’s only then that you notice. You bite your lip, and Steve taps your chin lightly as he walks by, and it’s only then that you notice. When she hasn’t shown up even after the noon rush, you go to Kosan-san and ask if you can take a five minute break. 

He raises his eyebrows and shakes his head no, irritated at the very idea. 

Breaks aren’t in the protocol. 

You’re a host, and you have more guests than her. 

She doesn’t arrive at her usual time for dinner, either, and by now, you’re wound up enough that Claudia, Steve, Wolly all notice.

She comes in at five to five, and your heart leaps at seeing her form, and falls at seeing her face. 

She looks terrible. Oh, her clothes and hair and makeup are impeccable as always, but her face, her eyes – you head towards her, barely making it to her side before MacPee is there. You shoot him a scorching glare and position yourself between him and her. “Good evening, Helena,” you tell her, and show her to a free table. 

She orders Scotch, neat. 

It’s one of the most expensive drinks on the menu, and if this were any other guest, with any other expression on their face, your heart would soar at the prospect of the commission it’s going to net you, but how can it, leaden as it sits in your chest at the look of her? 

She orders a second, a third, a forth. You gently ask if she wants food, and she shakes her head and orders a fifth, never even meeting your eyes. 

When you get back to the counter, MacPherson takes your arm. “It’s almost six, Bering,” he says. “You’ve been off for fifty minutes. What’s this? Hijacking my commission?”

You stare coldly at his hand until he removes it. “Overtime,” you tell him in a sweet voice. “You’ve heard of it, I’m sure.” It’s true - when you get a customer before the end of your shift, you can extend that shift beyond your closing time. You’re officially off the clock, so no salary, but you still get the commissions. You know that, MacPherson knows that, Kosan-san hasn’t stepped in - there’s nothing MacPee can do.

“MacPherson, Myka is her tantou and you know it,” Claudia chimes in from behind him. “Knock it off, will you? Ooh, now _they_ look promising.” This is for a party of four that’s just come in. MacPherson’s head shoots around like a shark smelling blood, and he’s off, trying to beat Claudia to them. 

“Dan told me she hasn’t been at work today,” Wolly tells you under his breath when he slides the glass of Scotch over. “He’s no idea why. Boss was livid; she’s one of their best engineers.” None of you is allowed to share such information, but he’s worried, you can see it in his eyes. Dan is one of Wolly’s regulars, typically seeking out a spot at the counter to reminisce about growing up in Wales over lunch. The British expat community in Roppongi is tightly knit, so it doesn’t surprise you that Dan knows Helena or works at the same place. It just heightens your own worry. Wolly then slides over a glass of water wordlessly, and you nod at him before you leave for her table. 

Helena ignores the water and downs the scotch in one go. She’s past wincing, even, and you wish your café had a policy that you could claim, in order to cut her off from drinking any more. Then you realize – she doesn’t know that such a policy doesn’t exist. Unless, possibly, MacPee told her that first night. 

You’ll take that chance. “I’m sorry,” you tell her when she looks up at you to order another. “If our bartender gives out a glass of water, that’s the signal that he thinks you’ve had enough. Wouldn’t you like to... call it a day, perhaps?”

Her eyes darken, and she shoots Wolly a glare that he very much doesn’t deserve. You’ll explain in the morning. “I would not,” she says starkly. “You’re cutting me off, then?” Her words are only slightly slurred, but she almost falls over when she stands from her chair and overbalances. 

“Here,” you say, catching her arm almost by instinct. 

She pulls it out of your grasp immediately and turns furious eyes on you. “Let go of me,” she hisses. Then she turns to walk – stalk, really – towards the exit. 

You trail behind her. “Would you like me to see you home?” you ask. 

“No, I would not,” she shoots back over her shoulder. Then she stops and turns, swaying slightly to her obvious chagrin. “Is this company policy, then?” she spits, “Overstepping customer boundaries? I thought you were better than _him_.” Her eyes find MacPherson across the room, and her words find your stomach like punches. 

You stand speechless as she leaves. 

Pete asks where you’ve been when you come home, and you brush him off. You lie awake for hours, worrying and castigating. ‘I thought you were better than him’ reverberates in your mind, over and over and over. 

The next day is your day off, and you try very hard to enjoy it, but when you return to work the day after that and Wolly tells you she hasn’t been in at all, your worry returns with a vengeance. You have to concentrate like a champion to make it through your shift without complaints, and that keeps your thoughts at bay, but the moment you get off shift, you head for the elevators to go up, not down, and shoot Pete a text to not wait up. 

Twenty floors, MacPee had said. You start with twenty-two, just to make sure, and look on every single doorframe if there’s a name on it. You know her last name from her credit card, and once she even joked about sharing initials with the famous author, and you’d told her ‘not only famous but my favorite’, and then you tried to cut the ensuing awkwardness by setting down the cup of Earl Grey you were holding and turning it so that the handle was within easy reach for her. 

Twenty-two doesn’t yield an apartment with ‘Wells’ on the door, but only a third of them have name tags in the first place. Yet you persevere, trying twenty-one next, and twenty after that. Nineteen and eighteen come up empty, too, and then, on a whim, you try twenty-three and there is a laundry delivery bag on one door handle, carefully knotted and smoothed and with one of her shirts hanging in plain sight. 

You send a prayer to any deity who might be listening, and knock on her door. 

She doesn’t open. There is exactly zero reaction from within. You briefly debate calling out her name, announcing your name, but this is Japan where you don’t make a racket in the hallway.

On the way back down, you ponder what you can do to apologize, to make sure Helena’s okay, to help with whatever she’s going through. Something occurs to you, and you push the button for your café’s floor again.

When you return to her floor, the laundry delivery still hangs on her doorknob. You set the plastic bag you brought on the foot mat, careful not to spill its contents, and retreat behind a corner to wait. 

It’s one twenty-five in the morning, according to your wrist watch, when the sound of a door latch, a sound _not_ preceded by the elevator door or footsteps in the hallway, rouses you. There’s a rustle of plastic being moved, a pause, then the click of the door closing. 

When you peer around the corner you’re hiding behind, you almost let go of a yelp. She’s standing right in front of you, bag in hand and held out towards you. 

“What’s this?” She sounds – tired, if anything. Weary beyond belief. 

You scramble upright, ducking your head slightly so as not to tower over her. “A… um, a surprise,” you murmur, debating as you say them the wisdom of your words. 

She stares at you and you quiver inside. She stares at you for five full seconds, with storm clouds passing through her eyes and lightning twitching across her cheeks. Then she stills, and her eyes flutter shut and her mouth curls up ever so slightly, ever so ironically, and you feel like you can finally breathe again. “Do come on in, then,” she says in a resigned tone of voice, and heads back to her door. 

Her apartment is dark, and cluttered to the point that you don’t know where to put your feet, especially sans shoes as is the custom in Japan.

“Sorry, I wasn’t expecting to entertain,” she says without turning around, but it doesn’t sound sarcastic. Tired, if anything. She steps over a throw pillow and puts your plastic bag on the table. Then she finally turns on a light over the kitchenette. 

You can see the laundry bag on a small couch. You can see a blanket half on, half off the couch, and a mountain of used tissues on the coffee table, a mountain tall enough to spill on the floor. You don’t comment on that, though, but point to the bag. “If you don’t tell Ishikawa-san, you can microwave this,” you say. “I’m sure it’s gotten cold by now.”

She looks down at the bag as though she’s forgotten about it already even if her hand is still holding the loops. She picks open the knot and lifts out the styrofoam container from among the swathes of newspaper. She’s between you and the light, so you can’t really make out her face, but you’re almost certain there’s a small smile somewhere when she opens the lid and smells the soup. “Still warm enough,” she shrugs, and sits down without any further ado. You’re certain the soup is stone cold by now, but you'd rather bite off your tongue than argue. From under another, smaller mound of tissues, she pulls a pair of chopsticks and stirs the soup with them.

You stand in the door feeling like an intruder. This time when the urge hits, you don’t stop your hand from reaching up and rubbing the back of your neck. “Um… would you like me to leave?” you ask, reminiscent of yesterday’s outburst. Plus, you really should be in bed; intermittent catnaps in a hallway aren’t enough to sustain you through tomorrow. But you don’t want to leave her all by herself. And it seems she can read your mind. 

“Do you want to?” she asks, chopsticks and noodles hovering. 

You blink in surprise, both at her question and at the literally visceral pull to stay here, in this dark, cluttered apartment with its mountains of tissues.

You take a deep breath and walk forward, taking a stack of file folders off the other chair and putting them on your lap when you sit down, for want of anywhere else to put them. “That answer your question?” you quip, but in a gentle, gentle voice. The light is behind her, which means it’s full on your face, which means she sees your smile, just as gentle as your voice has been. 

Her reply is to start eating. After a few bites, she reaches into the plastic bag again and pulls out one of the half-liter water bottles you put in there, hoping that the newspaper would insulate them from the soup’s heat. She drains half of it in one go, then attacks the soup with renewed vigor. Whenever she’s not concentrated on getting ramen onto her chopsticks, she’s looking at you as if you’re some kind of vision. 

“You’re the first person who’s ever visited me here,” she says, putting a small corner of your mind to rest that still hangs on to the memory of seeing her leave with MacPee. “I probably should apologize for the untidiness.”

You shrug lightly, deepening your smile a fraction. “It’s not like I announced my visit,” you say, with a hint of apology to your tone. 

She nods, and drops her gaze to the soup. “Thank you,” she murmurs so slowly you barely hear her. Then her shoulders sag and her hand drops the chopsticks, balling into a tight fist. 

You debate yourself wildly in your head, and then you take all of your courage, shout down the half of you that maintains this is a bad idea, and reach out and cover her hand with yours. 

You don’t say anything. You don’t squeeze. You just put it there, light as your shrug has been, ready to pull away if she does.

She doesn’t. In the light breaking through strands of her hair, you can see her jaw work. You think you see her mouth twitch and pull, but her face is in deep shadow – you can’t be sure. 

Her shoulders hunch wildly, suddenly, and just as suddenly she shoots out of her chair, turns, stumbles over the same throw pillow that she stepped over before, and rushes out of the room. You hear a door slide open, a toilet lid bang, and you regret that the soup isn’t going to end up nourishing her, after all. 

She reappears in the doorway a minute later, white as a sheet in the kitchenette’s neon light and with one hand still – or again, you argue, you heard the water flow just now – clenched around her hair. She looks indecisive, forlorn, and then she sways and you, no conscious thought involved, are out of your chair and in front of her in one quick movement. You grasp the one elbow that’s hanging down, and the shoulder of the arm that’s still up at her head, only now it’s reaching for you and she pulls you close, and you draw her body in and wrap your arms around her, smooth and easy as if the both of you had done this a million times before. 

She shivers wildly for a moment and then stills. Her arm drops but she doesn’t pull away. She leans forwards instead, rests most of her weight on you – which isn’t much. For a moment you wonder if she hasn’t eaten anything beyond what you serve her, and if that’s enough. She’s thin, _was_ thin from the beginning, with cheekbones sharp as knives and knuckles that almost poked through her skin. You could lift her easily; you’re in training to be a Secret Service agent after all, and you’re supposed to keep in shape even during an exchange semester. As it is, you just brace yourself and support her weight and hold her shoulders as they start to shake. 

She’s crying, but you wouldn’t know except for the shaking, except for the wetness soaking into your shirt where she’s hiding her face. 

She’s crying, and you don’t want to think too closely about the reason, but your heart aches for her anyway, because of the mounds of tissues and the knuckles poking through her skin. 

She’s crying, and shivering, and her knees buckle and you catch her weight for real, and carefully walk backwards to the sofa, nudging the laundry bag right to the floor with your foot – you doubt she cares, and if she does you’ll just pay for it to be ironed again. You sit down and pull her into your lap, and she curls into you and a sob tears through her whole body, diaphragm through larynx through throat. You hold her as another one chases it, hold her close and run your hand across her upper arm, and she curls up even more tightly, a human knot of misery in your lap that wakes a protectiveness in you that overwhelms you with its fierceness, even more so when you do start to ponder what might be hurting her so. Break-up? Something darker? Something else, completely unrelated? Whatever it is, you’re ready to bark and bite and chase it away, to cradle and shield her from it, to do what you can so that she never has to cry like this again, ever.

Her body can’t and doesn’t sustain her sobs for long, and her crying quietens, but doesn’t stop. She keeps shivering, and you fish for the blanket with your foot and pull it up over her shoulders. Your thoughts hover briefly over the fact that this is far beyond host-and-guest relations (’Is this company policy, then?’, you hear her words still and again), but you can’t find it in you to care. She’s a human being in need, and she’s let you in behind that wall she’s so carefully built. If she pushes you out tomorrow, if she reappears in the café and asks you to surprise her with your choice of breakfast – what are you going to do?

You can’t find it in you to care about that, either. 

Not when she’s stilled enough in your arms that you first wonder, then become convinced, that she’s fallen asleep. Her breaths are shallow and slow and open-mouthed – her nose is blocked from crying, of course. You shift very, very carefully to get more comfortable on her couch, and she moves, sniffles, shuffles to stay close to you, hand curled into the blanket between your shoulder and her face. 

You might have pressed a kiss on the top of her head, but you’ll deny it if anyone should ever ask. 

You fall asleep yourself after a while, and you’ll deny that too if anyone should ever ask. 

Morning light slants through the curtains when she stirs in your lap and your head snaps up. You blink, your eyes sandy from wearing contacts through sleep, your neck stiff as hell from sleeping sitting up, your thoughts disoriented by waking up in unknown surroundings. 

“Wh’ t’me isit?” she murmurs, still half asleep, and you blink at your wristwatch and see two things – one, it’s eight thirty-two and thus twenty-eight minutes before your shift starts, and two, you have half a dozen messages – from Pete, you’re willing to bet. But you can’t find it in you to care about either of these things, not when her voice, high and thin and half-asleep, is so close to your ear. 

For a long moment, you debate not answering. Your shift starts at nine, she usually comes in at nine-twenty, and probably heads to work after that. For a long moment, you don’t want any of that to intrude upon this sofa, upon you and her and your circle of arms around her. Then your conscientiousness wins out, and you say, very softly, “Eight thirty-three.”

For a long moment, she doesn’t move a muscle. Then her head burrows further into your shoulder, as if to get away from sunlight and mornings and time itself. She groans, no longer high and thin and half-asleep, but deep and heartfelt and annoyed. Then her head shoots up and her eyes find yours. “When do you have to be at work? Are you late? Will you get into trouble?”

Her eyes are bleary and panicked and red-rimmed, her face is splotchy from where it was pressed against her fingers, her hair is a mess and her breath is not good, and still you wouldn’t change a single thing about being here, with her, and that’s when you know you’re sunk, way beyond the point of no return, completely and utterly in love with her. 

You can’t help the smile that breaks across your face at that realization. You simply try to tone down its giddiness. She’s hungover; she doesn’t need bright things in her face first thing in the morning. “I’m okay,” you reassure her, “I’ve got more than twenty minutes. I’d like to freshen up if that’s okay, but that’s all I need.”

“Of course,” she says, and makes no move whatsoever to remove herself from your arms. 

Not that you do, either. 

Not for another minute or two, anyway. Then she sighs and averts her face. She pulls away from you slightly, and very reluctantly, you drop your arms. “I should get going, too,” she murmurs. 

“Can’t you take the day off?” you ask, no conscious thought involved whatsoever. “I mean,” you try to amend what you’ve blurted out, “you’re obviously not in a good place right now.” Your words die in your mouth when she looks at you darkly, and ’I thought you were better than _him_ ’ reverberates in your mind unbidden and unwanted. You swallow and look away. “I’m sorry,” you say softly, “that wasn’t my place to say.”

Because your eyes aren’t on her, you’re caught by surprise when she leans close enough to rest her forehead against yours for a brief moment. Then she pulls away again, turns away again, and says, “Sorry, bad breath,” and you chuckle, and she goes on, “And no, don’t apologize for that. You’re on my couch, you held me through the night; I think the question of what is and isn’t your place to say is, at the very least, a bit… ambiguous right now.” She is silent for a moment, then takes a breath and adds, “Working is one way for me to deal with… with what I’m dealing. Yesterday was… not a good day. Today might be a better one, with any luck. And that includes showing up in the office – and hopefully a good cuppa and breakfast before that.”

Thirteen minutes later you change into your pinstripe suit and reply to Pete’s texts with reassurance upon reassurance. If anyone in the locker room notices you were wearing yesterday’s t-shirt and jeans, no-one mentions it. 

Twenty-one minutes after that, you greet her and lead her to her favorite table, the quietest in the whole café. Three minutes after that, you set a piping hot bowl of miso ramen in front of her, and a good strong cup of Darjeeling. She looks up at you and smiles, no wall, no curtain, no holding back. There’s red around her eyes still, but her face is more open, her shoulders less tense than you’ve ever seen them. 

She enjoys breakfast – you can see it and she tells you so. “I shall see you later,” she says before she leaves. 

Seven hours later, you greet her and lead her right back to that table – at this point you consider it hers, and you see to it that you don’t place other guests there after four in the afternoon until she comes in at four thirty.

She seems, again, in a lighter mood, and so Wolly sends her a white Lady Grey with a tiny cookie (or biscuit, as he insists) in the saucer, and you watch her face for any sign of pain as you serve it. A brief pang does flash through her eyes, but then she takes the cookie and dips it in and bites off the soaked bit even though it’s barely larger than a fingernail. 

You exhale the breath you’ve been holding, and head to the kitchen to place an order of oyakodon for her dinner, with a side salad because even after three months of living here, you aren’t over how little in the way of vegetables most Japanese dishes contain. 

Eighty minutes after that, you’re back in your jeans and t-shirt, and she’s waiting outside the café’s back door. 

You blink, at a complete loss for words. 

Her eyes drop and her ears redden ever so slightly. “Would you…” she begins to ask the pavement, clears her throat and looks up at you. “Would you like to go for a walk?”

You blink again. A motion catches your eyes and you look at her hands, hanging left and right of her pants, clenching and unclenching reflexively. She’s nervous, you realize. Much more than asking you inside her place, she’s made a deliberate decision to seek you out and ask you for your company. “Yes,” you say, “yes, of course.”

You ask her for a moment of patience while you shoot another text to Pete. He’d worry if you were late without letting him know the reason, and you understand – even though this is Japan and you both know how low the crime rate is, this is also Roppongi, Tokyo, and the area is full of host clubs and maid cafés and pachinko parlors and, not too put too fine a point on it, yakuza. 

When you put your phone away, she takes your hand and links your fingers, and you smile at her, and your heart beats right up in your throat. You try to tamp down your smile, to not have it be too bright, because there’s pain still lurking in her eyes, pain that you can see even now that her walls are back up. 

She smiles back at you and it’s small, hesitant, shaky – but it’s the most precious smile you’ve ever gotten, linked as it is to her hand in yours. 

She lets you take the lead, and your feet take you to Hinokicho Park. It’s early enough in summer for jeans and t-shirt to be comfortable for a Colorado girl, and she’s wearing a suit jacket over her button-up and seems not too warm and not too cold. Up the hill and down the slope, you find a bench with a view of the playground but her eyes darken and she pulls you onwards. A suspicion hooks its claws deeper into your insides, somewhere behind your navel.

Her face is still taut when you find a bench that overlooks nothing but meadow and trees and a group of people whose dogs play together, not a single kid among them.

“My daughter died two months ago,” she says and you exhale softly but still there are claws sunk behind your navel. “SIDS,” she adds, then looks down at her hands which are clenched around the bench, left and right of her knees and knuckles white as bone.

You have no idea what to say to that. 

“Two months and a day, I suppose it is now,” she says. “It’s a bit difficult with the time difference sometimes,” she says.

“She was eight months old,” she says. 

“Her name was Christina,” she says. 

“I used to imagine how she'd love sweet things, how we’d enjoy them together,” she says.

“I’m so sorry,” you say, and fear that it won’t ever be enough.

She turns her eyes on you – dark like expensive chocolate, slanted like a cat’s, unguarded and excruciating. You have no idea what she reads in your face, but she nods after a moment. “Thank you,” she says and drops her gaze to her hands again. 

You sit in silence, because you still can’t find words; you can’t bring your thoughts to hold still enough to even remotely figure out what you should be saying right now.

“I figured you should know,” she says after a moment, “after yesterday.” She huffs a small, somewhat bitter laugh. “I came here to not think of it, or try at least. Asked to be placed at the Tokyo office for a year. To be around people who didn’t know, people who wouldn’t speak in hushed tones and look at me with pity in their eyes,” she detaches a hand and waves it around, “you know.”

You swallow. If she was your guest, if you were her host, you’d know what to do, but ever since yesterday, that has evaporated and now she sits there and looks at you and you have no idea what to do, none at all. Except for ‘no hushed tones and no pity in your eyes’, of course. And oh boy, do you understand that.

You clear your throat. “I get that,” you say. Your voice is still scratchy, and you clear your throat again. “I… I get that.” You came here for much the same reason, after all, if not quite so soon after the death of the one _you_ lost, your classmate, your boyfriend, the one whose life _you_ failed to safe. Sam’s been dead for half a year now, and you have been thinking of him less over the past months, but now that band-aid has been ripped off, and your heart is apparently nowhere near as healed as you thought it was. 

She looks up at you again, surprised from the look in her eyes. You can see realization dawning. “I’m so sorry,” she says, and it sounds just as small and forlorn and afraid-to-be-insufficient as yours did. Her hand finds yours, and makes you find that your fingers are wrapped around the bench just as tightly as hers were a moment ago. 

You curl them around her hand, no conscious thought involved. “His name was Sam. He was my boyfriend,” you say because you figure she should know. “We were in a car crash,” you add for the same reason, “and I…” you force yourself to go on. She should know. She should know all of it, just like she should know your full name. She should know it was your fault. “I couldn’t… I didn’t do CPR properly. I mean I knew how to do it, but I panicked and he was bleeding and I couldn’t decide if I needed to-” your voice breaks. It’s been a while since you last told that story – Pete knows, obviously, and Claudia and Steve don’t need to know – but apparently it still upsets you to the point of speechlessness. 

Her hand is still wrapped around yours. You realize that when she squeezes your fingers. You realize she’s talking when her voice struggles through the ringing in your ears. “-want to change the past, but we can’t.” Again, she huffs her bitter laugh. “My namesake’s imagination notwithstanding. All we can do is come to terms with it; at least that’s what they told me.” She looks around her for a moment, takes in the trees, the meadow, the houses and skyscrapers behind them. “No doing a stellar job at that, running away as I am,” she says dryly. 

You shrug, and will your fingers to loosen at least a little – it’s your knuckles that are white right now. “I guess we deal with shit any way we can,” you hear yourself say. “I thought I’d dealt better with it than I have, I guess, but here I am.”

At that, she looks at you, her full attention trained on you and only you. “Here you are indeed,” she breathes. “Here you are, and here I am, and for better or worse _that_ is something I cannot be sad about.” She reaches up with her free hand and pushes a curl behind your ear. Her smile is pinched and barely more than an attempt, but it’s there. “I saw you on that first day,” she says, “and I would have sought you out if your colleague hadn’t found me first. You wear that suit exceptionally well, and I was captivated.” Her smile grows a little, and her hand is still at your ear, in your curls, but you’re not complaining, not complaining at all. “I’ve never seen you with your hair down,” she says. “Never seen you in only a jeans and t-shirt before yesterday, either.” Her hand strays down your cheek, and you almost dip your head after it when it drops to her lap. “It makes such a difference, and yet it also doesn’t.”

You frown, thrown by her words. Her smile gains some strength from your confusion, and you suppose that’s a good thing at least. 

“Two different personas to show to the world, but only one Myka behind them,” she elaborates, and you feel the color rising in your cheeks. “Whilst I assume you don’t seek out every guest who fails to show up at her customary time, your care for people is genuine. Not like that…” she casts around for an appropriate word before settling on, “utter _pillock_ MacPherson.”

You can’t help it – a chuckle bubbles up at her words. “You punched him, didn’t you?” you ask.

“Hah.” She shakes her head. “As a matter of fact, I kicked him. Much more strength in my legs than in my arms.”

You stare. “You kicked him _in the face?_ ” Yes, you can do it too – but you’re in training to be an agent – she… well, apparently she’s proficient in some form of martial art, you tell yourself. It’s not like you know all that much about her.

She shrugs and confirms your theory. “Kenpo,” she says, tilting her head in question.

“I’ve heard of it,” you nod. You favor Krav Maga, yourself, but you sure have heard of Kenpo. You find yourself intrigued, and you find your thoughts no longer revolve around Sam, and around bleeding, and around insufficient CPR. You find that you’re still holding Helena’s hand. 

“He tried to kiss me,” she mutters darkly. Then she snorts softly. “Bad idea, bad execution, bad timing,” she lists. “The elevator doors opened behind me at that point, giving me a nice bit of space to step back and get my leg up, knock him out, and send the elevator right back down to the ground floor with him in it on his arse.”

You can’t help it – you laugh out loud at the mental image. “Nice one,” you say approvingly. 

“I quite liked it myself,” she says modestly. 

“Would you mind if I kissed you?” you hear yourself say, not a single conscious thought involved, and you blink, and she blinks, and then she nods and all the thoughts that had deserted you just then now come clamouring, arguing about what her nod means.

“Yes,” she breathes. Then she blinks again. “I mean, no, I wouldn’t mind,” she clarifies, and your thoughts calm down from their confusion. Not enough to allow for movement, though, so after a moment, it’s she who leans forwards, she who cups your cheek with her hand, she who presses her lips against yours.

You? You lean in, drawn to her as if by magnets, no conscious thought even necessary. Her lips are warm against yours, her fingers warm on your jaw, her breath warm as it rushes over your skin when she deepens the kiss. No conscious thought is involved in your fingers fighting to untangle themselves from hers, no conscious thought is involved in your arms coming up to embrace her, no conscious thought at all is involved when you kiss and kiss and kiss her. 

It’ll come later, part of you knows that even now. Later, you will think consciously about how to negotiate balancing budding love with two sets of grief. Later, you will think consciously about how both of you are here only temporarily. Later, you will think consciously about many things. 

Now, as the sun sets and the dogs and their people head home, as Roppongi Hills’ skyscrapers light up and the playground falls quiet, as she pulls you close when you start to shiver in dusk’s sudden chill, now you kiss, and kiss, and kiss her, and spare not a single thought on later.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a one-shot, written as a birthday present for my wife who's one of the best (or worst) plot bunny breeders in the world. This one she threw me yesterday; this story I wrote in the space of about six hours; it's unbeta-ed, of course (would spoil the surprise, after all), so all the mistakes and flaws are mine and mine alone. But this story? It's for her. Happy birthday, plot bunny breeder!


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